There is something quietly absurd about the way NATO has come to measure the worth of its members.
The GDP defence spending target — blunt, arithmetic, political — has become the alliance’s default yardstick.
Miss it, and you’re a free-rider. Hit it, and you’re a team player. The metric is clean, the politics are simple, and the picture it produces is almost entirely wrong.
Consider Türkiye. By the conventional scorecard, Türkiye is often cast as a complicated ally — too unpredictable, too transactional, too willing to maintain relationships that make Brussels uncomfortable.
That verdict, however, reflects an alliance framework designed for a different era — one in which security was something large countries produced and smaller ones consumed, in which the map of threats was relatively legible, and in which “burden-sharing” meant paying your share of a collective insurance premium.
That world has dissolved. And in the world replacing it, Türkiye looks less like a difficult ally and more like one of NATO’s most consequential strategic assets.
The distinction that changes everything
There is a useful, underused distinction between consuming security and producing it.
Most states do the former: they shelter under alliances, benefit from collective deterrence, and contribute money or troops to the common pool.
A smaller number of states do something more generative — they develop indigenous military capabilities, project power into regions that would otherwise be contested, train partner forces, and stabilise environments that would otherwise produce cascading crises.
Türkiye has, somewhat quietly, moved into this second category.
Its domestic defence industry now supplies advanced drone systems that have reshaped battlefield doctrine from the Second Karabakh War to Libya to Ukraine.
Its military has accumulated genuine operational experience across multiple theatres — Syria, the Black Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean — that few NATO allies can match.
And beyond its own forces, Türkiye has established training and capacity-building programmes across Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, enabling partner states to provide for their own security rather than simply importing it.
This is not a peripheral activity. It is, by any serious definition, the production of security as a strategic public good.
What the map actually shows
Look at where Türkiye is operating, and a picture comes into focus.
In Syria, it has conducted sustained counterterrorism operations while simultaneously engaging in post-conflict stabilisation — managing one of the most complex humanitarian and security situations on NATO’s periphery.
In the South Caucasus, it played an active role in shaping the outcome of Azerbaijan’s liberation of its occupied territories and has since pursued security cooperation across a region that sits at the intersection of Russian, Iranian, and Western interests.
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In the Black Sea, it controls the straits under the Montreux Convention, a power it has wielded with considerable strategic effect since the Russia-Ukraine war began.
